Listen Now

The idea of aligning customer experience and employee experience has been a topic that has been discussed quite a bit over the last few years. But, what does it really mean to align the employee and customer experience? We all inherently know that if we have a superior employee experience, we’re much more likely to have a superior customer experience. After all, companies that lead in customer experience have 60% more engaged employees, and study after study has shown that investing in employee experience impacts the customer experience and can generate a high ROI for the company. We can all agree that sounds great, but for many, the question is how do you operationalize it? We try to answer that question in this episode. We’re joined by Bill Staikos, Head of Customer Experience at Freddie Mac and the host of the podcast Be Customer Led. Not only will we compare notes on hosting podcasts, but Bill is also going to share his knowledge and experience about aligning customer and employee experiences at large organizations.  Bill’s background has taken him to organizations such as Chase, Credit Suisse, and American Express and his experience includes research & insights, data & analytics, leading UX/Design, transformation, and developing products for operational leaders to help them make the right decision on how to improve the customer experience. He has a lot of insight to share. As you listen to this episode, look forward to learning: The importance of breaking down silos to bring employee experience and customer experience leaders together. The most important CX and EX metrics that every experience leader should be monitoring. How Bill ties CX and EX data to business and financial metrics in a meaningful way. Bill’s experience and strategic insights are incredibly valuable for all of us. We hope you enjoy the episode.

When Colin Crowley joined Freshly as the VP of Customer Experience five years ago, he inherited a team of one. His first job was to build the infrastructure of Freshly’s customer experience capability. This job was not without its challenges - creating processes, procedures and a culture from scratch is never easy, and is even more difficult in a start-up environment. However, his effort has proven successful as Colin now leads a CX team of over 200. And Colin joins this episode of Designing Next to share his wisdom. Colin’s path to Freshly has been a bit non-traditional. Before starting at Freshly, Colin started in the world of national security, serving as a researcher and editor at prestigious think-tanks in Washington D.C. He then transitioned to CX, spending six years working at the e-commerce giant TicketNetwork and finishing his time there as AVP of Consumer Transactions. Beyond that, Colin is also a produced playwright who has been recognized in over 50 national and international playwriting contests and whose plays have been performed/produced across the United States. As you might imagine, we could speak to Colin about a multitude of subjects, but of course, we chose to really focus on his CX expertise in this episode. When you listen to this episode, you can look forward to learning:  How Colin approached building the infrastructure of Freshly’s CX effort in a start-up environment. How Colin and his team brought operations and customer experience together - so both groups could better serve their customers.  How Colin starts with the customer when he integrates AI and automation into the customer experience.  Colin shares a lot of great ideas and insights in this episode. We hope you enjoy it. 

On-demand meal delivery is a relatively young concept. It has grown consistently in the last few years, but its growth has been tremendous in the last six months during the COVID-19 pandemic. The category has become a very competitive space, and as a result, customer experience is a very important differentiating factor. In this episode, we learn how DoorDash is approaching customer experience with their Director of Customer Experience, Anastasia Zdoroviak.Although many of us are consumers of on-demand delivery services like DoorDash, we may not stop to think about how the experience goes beyond customers like ourselves. The Dashers and merchants that DoorDash serves are key audiences as well, and as Anastasia shares with us, a change to one audience's journey often impacts every audience they serve. Anastasia also shares how DoorDash built their customer experience team, and how they work to understand and improve the journeys all of their audiences take. When you listen to this episode, you can look forward to learning:  How DoorDash combines quantitative, qualitative, and behavioral data to better understand audience journeys. How DoorDash customer experience teams use human-centered design practices to rapidly innovate, design, test and roll out new experiences. How cross-functional teams across DoorDash collaborate as they continuously work to evolve the experience of all their audiences. Anastasia provides a lot of interesting insights throughout this episode. We hope you enjoy it. 

There has been a common theme in almost all of our episodes as we’ve discussed experience design, innovation and transformation - and that theme has been the importance of culture. As a lot of work has become remote as a result of the pandemic, building and maintaining culture has become an entirely new type of challenge for many of us - especially since it is so key to successful innovation and transformation efforts. This episode’s guest, Jim Kalbach, brings a wealth of experience and expertise in managing remote teams to Designing Next. Jim is Head of Customer Experience for Mural, a cloud-based digital workspace for visual collaboration. Before Mural, Jim worked in various design-related consulting roles for large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, LexisNexis, and Citrix. He is also an accomplished author of three books on topics ranging from web design to journey mapping, with a fourth to be published soon.We could likely speak with Jim for hours across a range of subjects, but in this episode we focused on something that is relevant to so many of us during these times - building and maintaining a strong culture in remote environments. Jim started building and leading remote teams long before COVID-19 came along, so he has a lot of wisdom he can share with us. When you listen to this episode, you can look forward to learning:  What the pandemic taught Jim and the team at Mural about their business as they grew so fast over the last six months. What organizations need to do to establish and maintain a culture in a remote or distributed work environment.  Why Jim believes remote or distributed work can be just as effective or even more effective than in-person work. Why Jim doesn’t like the term “human resources.” Jim shared a lot of interesting thoughts and concepts in this episode. We hope you enjoy it. Links:Jim’s TEDX talk: Jazz improvisation for radical collaborationJim’s books: Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User ExperienceMapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and DiagramsThe Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs

There are very few organizations in the world that have not attempted some form of digital transformation - it is an initiative that most of us have experience with. Yet, after 20+ years of digital transformation, many efforts still fail. Why is that? We explore that question in this episode of Designing Next with Jennifer Ishiguro, Vice President of Research, Experience Design, and Service Excellence at ATB Financial.Jennifer’s background has been at the intersection of Digital, Design, and Business for her entire career. As her graduate studies have added behavioral science to her expertise, her perspective on digital transformation has evolved. She has become even more focused on understanding how human-focused, behavioral approaches can not only help to drive business results but connect with customers and team members alike. In this episode, we speak to Jen about her role at ATB Financial, and how she brings a human perspective to their transformation efforts. When you listen to this episode, you can look forward to learning:  Why current approaches to transformation do more damage than good The importance of understanding how motivation drives people and drives change in transformational efforts Why Jen believes we that the term “change management” doesn’t set the right tone for the humans who are part of transformation efforts Why Jen prefers to use the term humility instead of empathy  Chad and Steve learned so much from Jennifer during this episode, and we know our listeners will as well. 

In our last episode, we had a wide-ranging discussion with Rick Evans, Senior Vice President & Chief Experience Officer at NewYork-Presbyterian. We covered quite a bit of territory in that conversation, including building better cultures, scaling culture in large organizations and how Rick and the team at NewYork-Presbyterian navigated the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19. In this episode, we dig into patient experience in the age of healthcare consumerism. As Rick was truly one of the first Chief Experience Officers in healthcare, he has a lot of perspective on the subject. As Rick shares with us, the patient experience extends far beyond the exam room or waiting room. From what it’s like to make an appointment at most hospital systems to understanding needs throughout the journey, we look at what makes up today’s patient experience from a holistic viewpoint. We really enjoyed our time with Rick over these two episodes. In the second part of our interview, you can look forward to hearing:  How Rick sees consumer expectations evolving in healthcare The role that access plays in customer and patient experience design What Rick believes are the most important attributes of the modern healthcare CXO We hope you enjoy this episode of Designing Next, and learn a bit too!

Rick Evans started his career in the non-profit world before transitioning into patient and customer experience work - almost before the discipline existed! In his career, he has led patient experience at two of the country’s most recognized hospitals - NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) and Mass General - and is considered one of the most influential and innovative leaders in the patient and staff experience space. As you listen to this episode, which is part one of a two-part interview, you will be struck by Rick’s dedication to culture. When he rejoined NYP for the second time a few years ago, one of the first things he did was co-create a Respect Credo with leadership and staff. As you will hear in our interview, that Credo guides much of what Rick and the team at NYP does. It played an essential role as they navigated the unimaginable challenges of COVID-19 this past Spring.There is a lot we can all learn from Rick, which is why our conversation will last over two episodes. In this first part of our interview, you can look forward to learning:  The lessons Rick has learned from building and scaling out an experienced-focused culture at large, multi-location organizations How the Respect Credo guides team members of all levels at NewYork-Presbyterian The role culture played as NYP navigated the unprecedented experience of COVID-19 We’ve been looking forward to our conversation with Rick since we launched the podcast. We hope you enjoy Rick sharing his experience and approach to culture - and we’re sure you’ll learn a bit too. 

T. Rowe Price is an 83-year old investment management firm based in Baltimore, MD that serves clients in 47 countries around the world.  In 2017, T. Rowe Price launched Innovation Centers in Baltimore, New York, and Maryland. All the Innovation Centers focused on bringing business and technology teams together to develop products in an agile approach, and the Maryland Innovation Center had an emphasis on client experience. Now, T. Rowe Price is working integrate and scale approaches from the Maryland Innovation Center into their full organization, and our guest this week, Brandi Overstreet, is guiding that process. Brandi is a senior manager and VP at T. Rowe Price. She has been with the firm since 2007 and currently guides product leadership initiatives and product development teams as they scale customer-centric and agile delivery practices that were born out of the Maryland Innovation Center. Prior to this role, Brandi spent five years focused on defining strategy and executing programs to enhance the workplace retirement plan investor’s experience. We’re excited to speak with her to learn more about the process of integrating T. Rowe Price’s new practices from their off-campus Maryland Innovation Center into the broader organization. When you listen to this episode, you can look forward to learning:  How T. Rowe Price approached the challenge of rolling out and scaling new approaches innovation at such a large organization The importance of bringing together cross-functional teams from the beginning of a project so they collaborate from end to end How T. Rowe Price been able to keep the momentum around innovation during the COVID-19 Pandemic  How being a DJ can prepare you for a career in Customer Experience We’re excited to share this episode of Designing Next with you. We hope you enjoy Brandi sharing her experience and perspective and that you gain interesting insights and contribute to your knowledge around innovation and experience design. 

Banner Health is a large non-profit health system, with 28 hospitals and over 50,000 employees. About four years ago, the system amped up its innovation effort, creating several teams called Imaginariums, which were similar to incubators. The Imaginariums drew talent from Banner Health itself as well as the worlds of retail, start-ups, and design agencies. Last year, all of those teams came together to form Banner Innovation Group (BIG). In this episode, we speak with Russ Maloney, Director of Innovation Services at BIG. Russ has been with Banner Health since the launch of the Imaginariums and has a unique perspective on Banner Health’s innovation journey that he will share with us. Both Steve and Chad know Russ well, as before he joined Banner Health, Russ was a co-founder of Cast & Hue and worked closely with Chad when he was the Chief Experience Officer at Nebraska Medicine. Russ is fascinated by knotty problems, emphatic ideas, hearty openness, and how they all converge in the healthcare environment. As a culture leader with Banner Innovation Group, Russ develops engagement models and tools from a foundation of empathy. He’s working toward a future healthcare system that is not only simpler, but more intuitively human.When you listen to this episode, you can look forward to learning:  The strategies and tactics that Russ and his team use to integrate innovation into the Banner Health culture The importance of listening to and collaborating with the audiences they are creating for The role of openness and transparency in innovation We’re excited to share episode #1 of Designing Next and we hope you enjoy every minute of it!

Introducing Designing Next: Achieving Growth Through Transformation and Innovation, a new podcast that speaks to experience design and innovation leaders about envisioning and designing new consumer-centric futures. Every two weeks, hosts Steve Koch and Chad Brough speak to a new guest in order to gain insights and learnings from those who are designing new experiences on a daily basis.